I’m sitting in Wetherspoons this morning, feeling incredibly smug to have bagged a table in a booth. Doing so seems to depend on arriving before 9:30.
I had planned to be here for breakfast yesterday morning, but overslept. That seems to happen when you work 18 hour days all week. I looked at the bedside alarm clock, saw 9:15 on its display, and realised Spoons had gone. Arriving mid-morning – especially on a Saturday – would tip me into chaotic family breakfast hell.
The rest of yesterday unfolded much as I imagine a supermarket trolley full of brick-a-brack being dipped down a steep rocky hillside might unfold.
We hired a carpet cleaning machine – a “Rug Doctor”. It looks like a heavy duty bouncer robot from Wall-E movie. You fill it with water and detergent, then pull it slowly backwards over carpets while it makes thunderous gurgling, roaring, and sucking sounds. You don’t want to know how horrifyingly brown the resulting water in its reservoir became.
After turning half the house inside out and opening all the windows, we then set off to the shop of dreams – John Lewis – to order a new cooker.
Our brave old cooker is over twenty years old. We bought it shortly after getting married. It’s been slowly failing for the last decade – propped up by spare parts from various engineers that have come out to look at it. Perhaps it’s most entertaining moment came when I called the manufacturer service department to get a replacement part for it, and they calmly informed me that they stopped manufacturing that model seven years previously.
We tried to get the interest free credit they advertised, and tried to get fitting, and disposal of the old cooker included. It turns out this is almost impossible to achieve because of some logistical black-hole peculiar to John Lewis. While talking at some length to the lovely floor cooker sales person, another family wandered over with exactly the same request. You might think it quite common to want to take advantage of interest free credit and cooker fitting and disposal – apparently not in the mind of the geniuses that advertise such plans.
We came away with the promise of a phone call on Tuesday. We’ll see what happens.
Looking around John Lewis is always entertaining. While my other half had the circular conversation in the cooker department I wandered over to the coffee machines. I thought our Dolce Gusto machine was quite snazzy. Apparently not as snazzy as a brushed metal artisan bean-to-cup machine that costs as much as a small family car. I nearly fell over.
You know the funny thing – as I gazed incredulously at the coffee machines, the one thing that went through my mind, other than “these must be for people that want to play at being a Starbucks barista at home”, was how horrific they must be to clean. I then began to wonder if people that own them also have stocks of cardboard mugs to write their family members names on – or their own name, if they live on their own. Perhaps they ask themselves if they want chocolate on their cappuccino too?
We left John Lewis shortly after I spotted pepper grinders that cost more than a year’s subscription to any of the popular TV movie channels.
In other news, my other half had COVID earlier in the week. She was sick throughout last weekend, but it only really showed up properly in the first half of the week. Apparently two new strains have been ripping through the general population. I seemed to escape with nothing more than feeling rubbish for a few days.
We are back up to a household of six again at home, which is making every day a bit of an adventure. I suspected I might have company this morning for the Spoons escape, but apparently getting up any earlier than mid-morning on a weekend is somewhat challenging.
The predicted arrival of countless young families has begun. I need to get out of here. A group of… (I try to count them without looking too obvious)… nine just sat down on the adjacent table to my booth. Another similarly sized group has arrived behind them.